This is one of my hot buttons. I cannot believe that ISO, ANSI,
IEEE, ACM, and such organizations make enough money on selling
standards documents to justify the harm done by not widely
disseminating them to anyone who might have an interest in
them.
This concern (outrage?) is amplified when I realize that the
standards were developed by the efforts of volunteers.
One of the strengths of the Internet is that one can get a
copy of the RFCs for a song (spend some bandwith or buy a
cheap CD-ROM). This allows anyone to critique a program's
implementation, refine said implementation, or reimplement
the operation with confidence that the standard is being
followed.
Perhaps we need to start an "Open Standards" movement which
calls for the free (in the GNU sense) distribution of any
standard. Just imagine, a CD-ROM holding all the useful
language and communication standards! Hmmm, perhaps I've
got to renew some memberships and start pushing.
Randolph Bentson